My ears are filled with water. My arms float next to me. Distantly, I see the surface of the water. A mantle spun from different material. A layer of ice.
The surface is floating farther and farther from me, as if it’s ever-rising and I’m the still, fixed point.
I can come up. I tell myself this. My lungs are swollen inside me, pinched and burning at the edges. It’s so quiet down here that I forget I’m anyone. My stomach jumps hard. My lungs stretch until they don’t fit the confines of my body. I’m already relenting. Blackness leaks in at the edges of my vision. I shut my eyes.
It’s all happening again.
I’ve missed this. I’ve kept it out of my mind, refusing to let myself remember. But now that it’s here, I know how deeply I’ve wanted to feel it again. Just one more time. The peacefulness of inevitability. Everything shedding away, piece by piece. Faster and faster. Weightless, I’m stripped of my past and my future, stripped of my choices. I’m a hanging heartbeat on the brink of being extinguished.
A name forms on my tongue.
It jolts through me. An awareness of my body around me, everything electrified with the urgent desire to draw a breath.
I open my eyes.
It’s a deep impulse, foreign and completely consuming, filling every part of me: Go.
I don’t have a chance to examine the sensation. I’m moving up, up, toward the faint streaks of light that signify the world above. I’m so swift, so assured, that it feels as if I’m being pulled in a current. I see myself as if I’m watching from a distance. This small, pale life against the darkness.
That layer of light is just above me now. Close enough that I could put out my fingers and break through it.
And he’s here. His silhouette blocking the moonlight. He reaches for me; I feel the strength and solidity of his hands, completely wrong in this place composed of softened sounds and floating impressions.
I barely have time to register his grip, and then we’re above the surface of the water. The air is sharp as a knife’s blade, thin and spare. Each lungful is brutally tender, as if I’m exposed to air on an undiscovered planet. I cough and choke.
He’s moving, clumsy and slow, back to shore. Everything is tilted and trembling, a world sent spinning like a marble across the floor. Pressed awkwardly to his body, I can feel the strain of his muscles, and, miraculously, the weight and stretch of my own body. My consciousness still tethered to my limbs.
We’re approaching the shore. The moon in the sky rights itself. The water is as high as his shoulders. When he stops, I lean against him, clutch at him. The other name dissolves on my tongue.
“I’m sorry,” he says, close in my ear. His voice is burning and clear; it’s as if I’m hearing a human voice for the first time. “I’m so sorry, Sylvia.”